By Dean L. Jones
Out of the countless numbers of health and disease reports the one that strikes at the core of living is the World Health Organization’s claim that about 12.9 million people worldwide die each year from some form of cardiovascular disease. Similarly, the World Cancer Research Fund estimates that some eight million people will die from cancer this year alone. The overwhelmingly large thing that these two diseases have in common are their dependency on the body’s manifestation of chronic inflammation.
Inflammation is part of the complex biological response of vascular tissues to harmful stimuli, such as pathogens, damaged cells, or irritants. When excessively consuming processed sugars, it can become one of those harmful irritants. Inflammation is a response from harmful stimuli to safeguard the damaged cells, but what is interesting is that the inflammatory process potentially begins with every bite of food and beverage that we ingest. Consuming foodstuff can either keep us in a proactive inflammatory balance or an anti-inflammatory imbalance. Ideally, it would be great to stay the course and only consume those things that keep the body in balance and not have it lean toward inflammatory calamity. So, the basic plan is then to know which foodstuff items to avoid and thereby reduce some harmful inflammatory causes.
Living SugarAlert is a longstanding statement from this column published in PACE News. Of the top ten most detrimental inflammatory foodstuff items, processed sugar is ingestion enemy number one. Eating excessive amounts of processed sugars will of course cause tooth decay, obesity and type 2 diabetes from a sedentary lifestyle, but more importantly it is a toxin that can bring about inflammation. Since inflammation is not something readily seen on the outside, acne is one of those outward inflammatory signs and taking a break from ingesting processed sugar may show some promising results.
The remaining top ten foodstuff items to avoid in order to reduce possible inflammation are polyunsaturated vegetable oils, trans fatty acids, cow’s milk and dairy products, commercially produced meats, red and processed meats, high consumption of alcohol, refined grains (such as white rice, white flour, white bread, noodles, pasta, biscuits and pastries), artificial food additives like aspartame and monosodium glutamate (MSG), and every so often people are sensitive to other food sources like fructans, galactans and polyols.
The challenge imposed on most Americans is the abundance of sugar-sweetened beverages offered nearly everywhere. This includes fruit drinks and punches that are so commonly served during the holiday season, which can at times be erroneously overlooked as non-harmful. For instance, drinking just one small can of Coke is the same as eating ten sugar cubes. Always bear in mind that the label on products have a variety of names for the same added sugar including, but not limited to; corn syrup, dextrose, fructose, golden syrup, maltose, sorghum syrup, sucrose…So live SugarAlert!
www.SugarAlert.com
Dean Jones is an Ethics Advocate, Southland Partnership Corporation (a public benefit organization), contributing his view on certain aspects of foodstuff.
